If you were to redo the scuba industry how would you do it?

[Lorenzoid]

2.) Quit indoctrinating people with the buddy Koolaide. It wasn't so long ago a number of people on ScubaBoard would speak out against anyone posting about solo diving...because they were solo diving, and that's just wrong! Some of these people have been so indoctrinated it's become a matter of faith with them. Even some seasoned divers remain against it, not just as something they choose not to do, but against other people doing it!

Think about our frustration with the liability risk and dive services provider insurance situation. We often post about the need to leave the responsibility for the risks of diving with the diver. No one else is your baby sitter. You are a certified diver, and it's on you to dive within your abilities.

Sounds great, right? But then from the start we indoctrinate people diving is too dangerous to do alone. Then they go on dive trips where they're accustomed to being led by a guide (I have no problem with that) called a 'dive master,' who often seems to mother hen them.

It's fine to teach buddy diving, and encourage is as a risk mitigation strategy, but not the end all, be all of diving. If we want people to be responsible for themselves, let's act like it's possible to dive without a caretaker.

I have long believed that dive training should teach either the buddy system or solo diving or both, but make sure the distinction is taught, and taught that on any given dive a diver needs to explicitly plan the dive as either a buddy dive or a solo dive. By all means, bring solo diving out of the closet and TEACH it. You wouldn't need an add-on Solo card; your OW card could certify you for Solo if you chose that route. If a diver is certified ONLY as a Solo diver and not as a (I'll call it) "Team" diver, the dive op shouldn't pair that diver with another Team diver.

 

[Lorenzoid]

If we do consider the perceived lack of new divers (hint, there has never been more new divers than now by any agency metric) how would making training harder and less available help that?

I'm not so sure it would make training significantly less available. It occurs to me that if the suggestion to split training and evaluation were adopted, one way to do it would be to enable the same person to qualify as a trainer and an evaluator. The person would just be prohibited from evaluating a student they themselves trained. Sure, there is potential for corruption in that kind of implementation, but we're just tossing around ideas here.

 

[Fishdip]

I think there is perhaps a need to better recognize that OW doesn't prepare your for all environments. Someone can be an extremely competent diver in warm clear water, but be dangerously lost in cold, low viz, high current environments. There is a dry suit certification, but not a cold water cert, per se. There is a night diver cert, but not a low viz cert. There is a "Tides and currents" course, but I don't know if it give you the experience of "Oh, this is what 4 knots feels like".

If you are someone who was certified in warm clear water, there is not a "How to dive in Puget Sound" class covering these things. Yeah, you can hire an instructor to create a course on local conditions, but that is not a mainstream thing. For that matter, I'm not sure you can even hire an instructor or DM to go with around here. Probably can, I just have never tried.

Anyway, my point is that OW doesn't prepare you for diving everywhere and there is not really a great system to get up to speed on local conditions and whatever local knowledge you might need for a new location.

So, maybe if more shops offered a "local orientation dive" program where you get an hour in the shop talking about local sites, conditions and area specific hazards, and then maybe a dive or two to get used to those conditions, it would help with getting in the water in new places and probably also generate some rental income for the shops.

What makes this a even bigger issue is places like the blue hole in NM or the creator in UT are “open water” its really just a swimming pool.

 

[drrich2]

I have long believed that dive training should teach either the buddy system or solo diving or both, but make sure the distinction is taught, and taught that on any given dive a diver needs to explicitly plan the dive as either a buddy dive or a solo dive.

Agreed. I'm not out to encourage people to head off solo diving right out of basic OW, but I'd like the buddy system seen as one of the risk mitigation strategies in the diver's tool box, not unlike carrying cutting tools, a redundant gas supply, a backup dive computer, respecting a 'hard' depth limit and avoiding overhead environments in light of your present training and experience level, etc...

So someone who wants to dive, oh, say, the house reef from the pier at Buddy Dive Resort is different from someone who wants to jump off a liveaboard and head off alone, away from the group. You assess the conditions, need for navigation vs. following a guide, etc... I expect buddy diving would still be strongly encouraged, but solo diving would be viewed as a logical, reasonable path for those who want to pursue it over time in suitable conditions.

---

I'd also like to see more formal recognition of the way buddy diving, and particularly group diving, happen in the real world. This vision of buddy diving as staying within 10 feet (or maybe arm's length) with tight coordination and frequent communication is not what consistently happens from what I've seen. I have no problem with people who want to dive that way with their likeminded buddies; I don't want the mindset imposed on everyone.

How many times when someone dies or disappears do we see 'Where was the buddy?' Then there are the anxiety provoking court cases where a buddy gets prosecuted because someone died.

I'd like to see a vision where the buddy is not your baby sitter or life guard, but someone diving in your vicinity with the same overall dive plan, willing to render aid if evident to him/her it's needed, and yet we live in an imperfect world - people get separated, one gets in the trouble and the other doesn't notice, etc..., and that's not negligent homicide.

 

[Dan G]

Interest

How about changing it to the same model as the ski industry, snow or water. Buy your stuff and go enjoy yourself.

Choosing skiing is a good analogy. I would point out that virtually every day at every resort, there are paid professionals employed by the resort who haul skiers down the mountain due to injury.

Backcountry skiing is a different story. The people who do rescue are more likely to be volunteers who mainly do corpse recovery rather than extricating injured people from the backcountry.

Climbing, both rock and ice, would be an even better analogy. Buy or rent gear. Go into the mountains with one or more people who don't mind a novice around and try your best. Hope you don't injure yourself before you realize how little you know. People do very unsafe stuff while climbing all the time. Some get away with it. Others don't and you end up reading about those folks in the annual "Accidents in North American Mountaineering" publication.

 

[boulderjohn]

I'd say that rock climbing has about the same potential for danger as scuba, in that you really need to know what you're doing to consistently prevent accidents. To me, the training and certification focus in scuba seems a bit nanny-state-ish

Rock climbing is very popular in the area where I live. I know people who have moved here because of that. We usually have several deaths a year.

 

[boulderjohn]

I think there is perhaps a need to better recognize that OW doesn't prepare your for all environments. Someone can be an extremely competent diver in warm clear water, but be dangerously lost in cold, low viz, high current environments. There is a dry suit certification, but not a cold water cert, per se. There is a night diver cert, but not a low viz cert. There is a "Tides and currents" course, but I don't know if it give you the experience of "Oh, this is what 4 knots feels like".

If you are someone who was certified in warm clear water, there is not a "How to dive in Puget Sound" class covering these things. Yeah, you can hire an instructor to create a course on local conditions, but that is not a mainstream thing. For that matter, I'm not sure you can even hire an instructor or DM to go with around here. Probably can, I just have never tried.

Anyway, my point is that OW doesn't prepare you for diving everywhere and there is not really a great system to get up to speed on local conditions and whatever local knowledge you might need for a new location.

So, maybe if more shops offered a "local orientation dive" program where you get an hour in the shop talking about local sites, conditions and area specific hazards, and then maybe a dive or two to get used to those conditions, it would help with getting in the water in new places and probably also generate some rental income for the shops.

One of the sub-courses of my SSI AOW repeatedly suggested it was teaching you how to dive in limited visibility, not just night. In my opinion, that entire section was about night-diving and none of it was about diving in very silty water.

I can share tips I learned from experience, like go slow, feel ahead, better vis might be available going up a few feet, and beware entanglements. But they didn't teach any of that.

So you think dive shops and agencies should offer courses for local conditions. They could call those courses "specialty courses." I am sure everyone would see those as good additions to training.

As for the suggestion of going to local shops for orientation to local conditions for which you are not experienced, that has been a standard part of the PADI OW course for at least as long as I have been diving.

 

[Lorenzoid]

I'd also like to see more formal recognition of the way buddy diving, and particularly group diving, happen in the real world. This vision of buddy diving as staying within 10 feet (or maybe arm's length) with tight coordination and frequent communication is not what consistently happens from what I've seen. I have no problem with people who want to dive that way with their likeminded buddies; I don't want the mindset imposed on everyone.

How many times when someone dies or disappears do we see 'Where was the buddy?' Then there are the anxiety provoking court cases where a buddy gets prosecuted because someone died.

I'd like to see a vision where the buddy is not your baby sitter or life guard, but someone diving in your vicinity with the same overall dive plan, willing to render aid if evident to him/her it's needed, and yet we live in an imperfect world - people get separated, one gets in the trouble and the other doesn't notice, etc..., and that's not negligent homicide.

I think we disagree somewhat. I believe buddy diving should be taught as sticking together within a diver-length or so of each other, reasonably vigilant and ready to assist. If two people want to dive "in the vicinity" of each other--maybe their goal is to be photographers--then I believe they should be taught that those dives are to be planned and executed as solo dives. "Want to take pictures underwater?" reads the advertisement. "The Solo option is probably the right choice for you!" People may get lazy after certification "in the real world," but I believe it ought to be taught that way--as a choice the diver needs to actively make--and the seriousness of it emphasized in class more than it is now. If a buddy-trained diver doesn't adhere to what they're taught, then they at least may be more likely to realize that what they are doing is called solo diving, which was the other course option they could have chosen for their OW class (in my take on the new and improved scuba industry regime we're imagining).

One or the other--solo diving or team diving--not a muddling of the two.

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

Rock climbing is very popular in the area where I live. I know people who have moved here because of that. We usually have several deaths a year.

And how many during rock climbing courses?

 

[runsongas]

@SlugLife several of the training agencies are already non-profit like gue/naui/cmas/bsac etc. being non profit doesn't exempt them from the same insurance and liability issues (although the EU/UK agencies have it a bit easier because its harder to sue there). and if you want scuba instruction to be a career or even at least a job rather than a weekend volunteer gig, club based diving isn't going to help.

open source would be even trickier than the current regime. how would you get ISO or similar certification to validate your training program and ensure instructors are following any standards when its a thousand headless chickens doing their own thing?